Tag: gocept

At Berlin Strategic sprint 2016 we developed a tool to analyze a ZODB Filestorage to find Python 2 string objects. If they are in an encoding besides ASCII this is preventing using this Filestorage with Python 3 because of decoding errors arising on loading the pickles.
The tool is even able to convert those strings either to unicode by decoding them using a configurable encoding or convert them to zodbpickle.binary so Python 3 will read them as bytes.
There is documentation of the tool and a repository on GitHub where the code lives.

There are still some questions open:

Is there already another tool for this analysis/migration?

Is there already any practical knowledge migrating Filestorage contents to Python 3?

Do you think such a tool is the right approach to achieve such a migration?

Is there anyone who wants to try out the tool on a Filestorage of a personal project and share the experiences? (We analyzed two projects where we have access to a Filestorage but we are sure this does not catch all the edge cases.)

Today’s blogpost is all about me. I joined gocept about a year ago, therefore I want to tell you something about the past – and something about the future.

The Past

Before joining the gocept crew, I studied computing at the HTWK in Leipzig for 6 years. Since sitting in a german university was not enough for me, I reached out to study in the UK for the best time of a year. This way I came to the University of Bolton near Manchester, where – most importantly – I learned to speak English fluently.

During my time in the UK I started to look into Ruby on Rails and earned my first salaries. This was the point were I switched my Linux PC for a Mac. Since I already was comfortable with Windows and Linux I wanted to try out the last big operation system out there. But as many before me, I liked the Mac so much that I still use it as my development machine.

Back in Germany I continued to earn some money on the side working with Ruby on Rails. I really enjoyed using Ruby and I think in terms of readability it’s ahead of most other programming languages by several magnitudes. But Ruby also has its shortcomings, which I did not recognize until I switched to Python as my main programming language here at gocept.

I also did some very interesting projects during my studies, here are just three of them:

An OCR software which recognizes mathematical symbols. The idea was to integrate it into the Leibniz-project to make it possible for blind people to read mathematical school books.

An iPhone app that helps developers and freelancers to get better at estimating how long it takes to implement a feature or project.

After I finished my master thesis, I had the opportunity to go on a 2-month vacation with my wife. So we took two backpacks and travelled around the entire US. A memory I will feast on my entire life. You can get some impressions on my flickr fotostream.

The Future

During the last year at gocept, I dove into the code base of two of our biggest clients – DGB and Ver.di – and helped improving their CMS. Currently I am getting in touch with the code base of Zeit Online, since a colleague will move to the upper floor, where our admins are situated.

But most importantly, you will see me more often around here, since I will be writing about things we do and learn here at gocept during the following months. I already have some topics on my desk which are worth a blogpost. For example, why hg rebase can be harmful, why testing AJAX using Jasmine is a pain, the benefits of a headless browser like PhantomJS and many more.

Next up will be a post about something we did at the summer sprint, which includes an Arduino, an LED strip and a failing test server.

Travis-CI is a free hosted continuous integration platform for the open source community. It has a good integration with Github, so each push to a project runs the tests of the project.

gocept.selenium is a python package our company has developed as a test-friendly Python API for Selenium which allows to run tests in a browser.

Travis-CI uses YML-Files to configure the test run. I found only little documentation how to run Selenium tests on Travis-CI. But it is straight forward. The following YML file I took from a personal project of mine. (I simplified it a bit for this blog post.):